The Problem With Building An Embassy Fit For An Empire...

[bridgit]

The headline reads: "Thousands of angry Iraqis pillage billion-dollar U.S. Embassy in Baghdad." The article details the ransacking of the grandiose American Embassy by Iraqi mobs.

This is the story I expect to read one day within the next decade.

In the 1950s, when I was in high school in Baghdad, my friends and I admired the technological advances of America and the West. But we resented the colonial tendencies of the West (especially, at the time, those of the British). Many demonstrations were held in front of the British and American embassies. The Iraqis are a proud people, and they resented foreigners meddling in their affairs. And the British were, in reality, running the country through a puppet regime.

You may call it false pride; you may call it a preoccupation with dignity; or you may simply call it an honest concern about sovereignty. In any case, this is what the culture of the region dictates.

So, with this in mind, why has Washington never taken the cultural context of the Iraqis into consideration? Instead, Congress has appropriated nearly $1 billion to build the largest embassy in the world. A significant portion of that money is for security infrastructure. This future "fortress" is housed in Saddam Hussein's former palace - providing more bad symbolism to the Iraqis.'

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0320-21.htm

[izzie]

1. My bet is with you. It will come down.

The people also who work in these places live on a different level and local people do not like that. I have knew people in that line of work and they make no bones about having to be put above the local people. I also lived in a Arab country and lived much better then they did and the workers that came in from other countries. It has to be some thing that gets to locals. If you come from a country that has power over you it has to count for even more bad feelings.